Emma Janicki
Department of English, University at Buffalo, Buffalo NY
14214
Advanced Honors College Scholar
English Honors
Advisors:
Dr. Jean-Jacques Thomas, Romance Languages and
Literatures
Dr. Steven Miller, English
Marguerite Duras
Female Desire: Alcoholism, the Ocean,
Homosexuality, and Violence
I explored how female desire is represented in the works of Marguerite Duras through the themes of female alcoholism as a substitution for a desire and a result of the stunting of emotion caused by a
perpetually inveterate life; the ocean as a physical representation of female desire as cosmic and liberated; homosexuality as desire without object and the death of desire; and violence among heterosexual
couples as necessary to merge with the Other. Desire, for Duras, is predicated on the unsurmountable sexual difference between people which can only be overcome through violence, and ultimately,
through violent murder.
alcoholism
Anne Desbaresdes (Jeanne Moreau) and Chauvin (Jean-Paul
Belmondo) discuss a murder of passion over wine in Seven Days
and Seven Nights (1960), the film adaptation by Duras and her
lover, Gérard Jarlot, of Duras’ Moderato Cantabile (1958).
“I’ve always drunk with men. Alcohol is
linked to the memory of sexual violence – it
makes it glow, it’s inseparable from it. But
only in the mind. Alcohol is a substitute for
pleasure thought it doesn’t replace it. People
obsessed with sex aren’t usually alcoholics.
Alcoholics, even those in the gutter, tend to
be intellectuals.” Practicalities 16
The ocean
“It occurs to you that the black
sea is moving in the stead of
something else, of you and of
the dark shape on the bed.
You finish your sentence.
You tell yourself that if now, at
this hour of night, she died, it
would be easier for you to make
her disappear off the face of the
earth, to throw her into the
black water, it would only take a
few minutes to throw a body as
light as that into the rising tide,
and free the bed of the stench of
heliotrope and citron.”
The Malady of Death 28
every day and drinks with
Chauvin in order to
approximate the life of the
woman murdered at the
opening of the story.
In Emily L., Duras and Yann
Andréa Steiner drink and talk
about Emily L. and her
husband, labelling them as
“hard drinkers.” Duras said
Emily L. was her favorite
Her female protagonists turn to character, “an alcoholic with
alcohol as a substitution for
holes in her shoes.”
desire and as a result of living
very habitual lives.
During the final twenty years of
her life, Duras’ alcoholism was
extreme – she and her lovers
would consume 6-8 liters of
wine per day.
Homosexuality
“I said it again – that I was going to write the
story of the affair we’d had together, the one
that was still there and taking forever it die.”
Emily L. 12
“I am dead.
I have no desire
for you.
My body no
longer wants
the one
who doesn’t love.”
The Lover
Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a In Moderato Cantabile, Anne
Summer Night and Emily L. all Desbaresdes goes to a local café
have female alcoholics at their
center. In Practicalities and
Writing, Duras discusses the
influence of alcohol on her
writings.
 Born Marguerite Donnadieu, April 4, 1914 in
French Indochina
 Died March 3, 1996 in France
 Her mother and father moved to Indochina
where she worked as a schoolteacher and he
worked as a professor of mathematics
 Her father died in 1918
 She had two bothers, Pierre and Paulo, and had
an incestuous relationship with Paulo
Duras grew up on the banks of the Mekong River in
Vietnam and the water never left her.
 Her mother purchased land in Cambodia from
the French government to farm rice. But the
land was flooded each year by the river and she
lost 20 years of savings. This event figures
prominently in The Sea Wall, The Lover and
The North China Lover
La mer, the ocean in French, is a feminine word. La  Was married to Robert Antelme. Antelme was
imprisoned in Dachau. Mascolo and Francois
mer comes to represent and inscribe female desire in
Duras, and more largely in contemporary French
Mitterand rescued him from the camp after the
feminism, including feminist theorist Hélène Cixous.
German surrender
La mer is constantly shifting across the planet; it
 Has one son, Jean Mascolo, by her longtime
cannot be conquered and possessed by man; it gives
lover Dionys Mascolo
life and it destroys life; its waves ebb and flow like
 Was an active member of the Communist Party
female desire.
and the Resistance
The ocean, or other bodies of water, figure
 Fell into a five-month long coma in 1988
prominently in how desire operates in The Ravishing  Wrote more than 40 novels; made 20 films
of Lol Stein , Emily L., and The Malady of Death.
Duras and Yann Andréa Steiner, her homosexual
partner. She dictated The Malady of Death to him
and he figures as a central figure in Emily L.
Although Duras fought
vehemently for human
rights, her understanding of
homosexuality is troubling to
a modern reader.
Because of Duras’
understanding of the nature
of desire, she saw
homosexuality as a form of
death. As homosexuality is
desire for a member of the
same sex, sexual difference –
the cornerstone of Durassian
desire – is unimportant. She
saw homosexual desire as a
desire without an object.
But this view is not without
motivation – Duras lived
with Yann Andréa Steiner, a
gay man, at the end of her
life. He took care of her and
worshipped her work, but
frustrated her in his sexual
escapades.
Like so many of Duras’
affairs, she used writing as a
way to deal with her own
non-normative sexual
relationships.
The Malady of Death is
widely regarded as a novel
about homosexuality.
Violence
Duras and her lover
Gérard Jarlot. The two
had a violent relationship
and engaged in heavy
drinking. After Duras
helped him win the Prix
Médicis, the two broke up
out of literary and sexual
jealousy.
“She says: The
wish to be
about to kill a
lover, to keep
him for
yourself,
yourself alone,
to take him,
steal him in
defiance of
every law,
every moral
authority – you
don’t know
what that is,
you’ve never
experienced
it?
You say:
Never.”
For Duras, desire is
necessarily predicated on
sexual difference, or, the
impassable boundaries
between people. Desire can
only exist when the Other –
another person – is totally
separate from oneself. So, the
ultimate satisfaction of desire,
the death of desire, can only
happen when the Other is no
longer ‘other,’ is no longer
separate from oneself.
But this merging, absorption,
of selves does not happen in
the act of sexual intercourse –
it happens through Durassian
violence, particularly through
passionate murder.
The Malady of
Death 42
For example, in Moderato
Cantabile and 10:30 on a
The unnamed woman Summer Night, Duras’
of The Man Sitting in female protagonists seek to
the Corridor reaches parallel the lives of the
murdered women.
orgasm through
violence.
But in The Malady of Death,
In The English
the man never satisfies his
Mint, Claire kills
desire because he only thinks
Marie-Thérèse to
about violence.
merge with her.
“A woman’s body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor – once, by smashing yokes and censors, she lets it articulate the profusion of meanings that run through it in every direction – will make the old single-grooved mother
tongue reverberate with more than one language.” Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”